So long and thanks for all the fish

Posted on 4 Aug 2013 by lornaofarabia

The last two days of our summer vacation were given over to a shop-til-we-drop London scavenger hunt. The list of required items was long and varied. We split it in half and raced separately around the city in search of (among other things) hedge clippers, mortar and pestle, watch batteries, photo lens filters, lemons, Crest toothpaste, battery-powered emergency lights, arugula seeds, a shower curtain, single-malt whisky, a bike tire valve adapter, dried tarragon, a guidebook to Madagascar, cream cheese, work shoes, a 2014 pocket calendar, and a duffel bag (to put all the stuff in).

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Better put new clothes for work on the shopping list, too

Missions accomplished, we met up at the Globe Theatre. The Globe is a faithful recreation of Shakespeare’s theater on its original site south of the Thames. We saw a new play called Gabriel, about the life of the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell. The playwright Samuel Adamson wrote the show for the trumpeter Alison Balsom, who performs in it. It was a grand evening.

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But now we must go back to Africa. School starts in a week. Boy, am I ever going to miss the fish.

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Glasgow

Posted on 1 Aug 2013 by lornaofarabia

We had planned to visit the whisky isles – Jura and Islay – but after our last day on Mull, we thought that anything else we might do in the islands couldn’t compare with our trip to Staffa and Lunga. So we decided to start the trek back toward home with a couple of days in Glasgow.

In the west end, where we are staying
Another west end view

People often have a lot of negative things to say about Glasgow. In my (slightly limited, I admit) experience, these are unfounded criticisms. It seems that many of the people dissing this place have never even been here.

Don’t listen to them. Glasgow has architecture

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history

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style

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Where else would I go to get my hair cut?

art

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great food

Very yummy (and huge) dinner this cafe our first night. See the previous post for pix.
Amazing dinner at this place across the street from our hotel. Too fancy for food pictures.

and a wicked sense of humor

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Oh, and whisky, too.

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Fun night out with live music at the Ben Nevis

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Don’t let a little Cullen skink scare you

Posted on 31 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

Scottish cuisine gets an undeservedly bad rap. Everyone likes to poke fun at haggis (see the video clip in this post from my old food blog if you’re into haggis humor). But the great chieftain of the pudding race gets the last laugh. It’s quite tasty. Really.

deep fried curry haggis samosas

Haggis pakoras!

Scotland produces many excellent local meats, both wild and farmed.  You can’t do better than Scottish lamb, beef, and salmon. Often there is game on the menu, including grouse, venison, and woodcock.  Living as we do in landlocked Ethiopia, the abundance of seafood on offer is a particular treat for us.

Ad for the fresh fish wagon. Stromness, Orkney.

Ad for the fresh fish wagon. Stromness, Orkney.

I think we have eaten fresh fish every day of this trip.

Here’s a slideshow of some of the delicious meals we’ve enjoyed in Scotland:

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Staffa and Treshnish

Posted on 30 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

Wow.

We’ve seen some great stuff on this trip, but this really puts a bow on it.

We booked a daytrip to Staffa and Treshnish through Turus Mara. A little bus picked us up at Salen’s village center and delivered us to the harbor at Ulva Ferry on the west coast of Mull.

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The shop in Salen’s village center, where the bus picked us up.

At Ulva Ferry we got on a small boat. We passed many uninhabited and privately owned islands on the way to our first destination.

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Fingal’s Cave on Staffa was one of the places I most wanted to see in the western isles.  Its unusual rock formations inspired music by Felix Mendelssohn

and, more recently, by Ashland Oregon’s own Brian Freeman.

There is a corresponding rock formation of hexagonal basalt pillars in Ireland called the Giant’s Causeway, which I visited many years ago.

Legend has it that the two places were the ends of a bridge built by the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill when he wanted to fight his Scottish counterpart Fingal (or Benandonner). Or that the two were formed when the giants threw rocks at each other… you know how legends can be. Anyway I’ve wanted for 30 years to see the other end. It was worth the wait.

We landed on the uninhabited island for about an hour – time enough to see the cave and walk around a bit on the top of the island.

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Then we got back on the boat and headed for the Treshnish Isles.

I hadn’t heard of the Treshnish archipelago before looking into options for visiting Staffa. The islands were inhabited on and off for centuries, but now they are a protected bird area.  The birds there have no fear of humans. I have to say that the two hours we spent on the island of Lunga were nothing short of magical.

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Iona

Posted on 29 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

Today we took a boat from Mull to the even smaller island of Iona.

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Iona was a hopping center of Celtic Christianity back in the day.

St. Columba arrived there with twelve of his Irish buddies in the year 503. He wasn’t a saint yet, but rather an exiled monk (back home he’d got into some trouble over a psalter that led to a nasty battle).  But pretty soon he had a religious colony going.

Columba founded an abbey on Iona. The monastery sent out missionaries who succeeded in converting the Picts of northern Scotland. After Columba died his shrine became an important pilgrimage site.

The little building is the rebuilt Columba shrine; the shrine itself is no longer there.
This picture (from an information board at the site) shows how the shadow of the St. John’s cross falls on the holy shrine… just like those neolithic monuments on Orkney and elsewhere.

It’s still something of a pilgrimage site for  the spiritually or historically inclined (we fall into the latter category).

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Next to a holy well (probably holy in pagan times as well) are these clachan brath, or prayer stones. The depressions once held white marble orbs that pilgrims rotated as they prayed. The world was supposed to end when they wore through…

The early monks were a creative bunch. They came up with the Celtic cross:

IMG_0477and the idea of blessings and crosses on gravestones:

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They practiced all kinds of arts…

including illustrating the Book of Kells (whether on Iona or in Ireland is still debated… see the film The Secret of Kells for the Irish version of the story).

Columba’s abbey has been rebuilt multiple times, but always on the same site.

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After 664 Iona wasn’t on the same page as the Roman branch of the church. While the rest of Britain went with Rome, in the 700s and 800s Iona was a thriving stronghold of the Celtic kind of Christianity.  Things started to go into decline in the late 800s when Iona was subject to repeated Viking raids.  That’s when the monks moved the book of Kells to Ireland to hide it from marauding Norsemen. By the end of the 1100s the Vikings were Christians themselves and ceased to be a problem to the Iona monks.

In the 1200s the Benedictine monks came along and revitalized the place. They rebuilt the abbey and added a nunnery.

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Iona was important throughout Scotland. According to legend, 48 Scottish kings are buried in the reilig odran graveyard, including Macbeth (yes, that one) and the powerful lairds of the isles.

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Mulling it over

Posted on 28 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

Sorry. I know my titles get pretty cheesy sometimes.

We spent last night in Oban, then this morning made the short crossing by ferry to the Isle of Mull.

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In the village of Salen, on Mull

We dropped our bags off at a B&B in Salen, and then caught a bus up to the main town of Tobermory. You never saw a cuter little port town.

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We rented a car in Tobermory. After dinner we drove around the northern part of the island a bit. The sun still doesn’t go down until after 10, so there’s lots of time for sightseeing.

We stopped in for a pint at the Bellachroy, the oldest pub on the island (est 1608)

Once again, I’ve found a job for myself. Just in case we decide to stay. I’m mulling it over.

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Mucking about

Posted on 27 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

Today we took the long way back from Rum. Most days of the week there is a ferry that goes from one small isle to another, but on summer Saturdays there is a ferry that starts on the mainland and stops at all four of the small isles before returning to the mainland. We embarked at the first island stop, so we got to land at all the others on our way to Mallaig.

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Canna: a tiny island that belonged to the Gaelic folklore scholar John Lorne Campbell until he donated it to the Scottish National Trust in 1981. About 10 people live there now:

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Muck: about 30 people live here, farming the land under the protective eye of the benevolent laird, Lawrence MacEwen:

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Eigg: in 1997, the 65 residents of this island bought out their absentee landlord and the island is now owned by a community trust. Eigg is energy self-sufficient: all power comes from wind, water, and sun:

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Back in Mallaig we got the train heading south.

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Recognize this bridge? It’s the one the Hogwarts Express crosses.

Kosta flies back to Wisconsin early tomorrow. We said goodbye to him in Crianlarich where Andreas and I transferred to the train to Oban; Kosta stayed on for Glasgow Queen Street, the end of the line.

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Midges and magnates

Posted on 26 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

This morning we took the the ferry from Ardvasar to Mallaig, on the mainland. There we boarded another ferry that took us to Rum, the largest in a group of four islands called “the small isles.”

Rum has plenty of outdoor attractions to explore: a population of red deer, unusual birds, nice vistas, abandoned villages.

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Unfortunately it also has swarms of midges (tiny biting insects) and clegs (vicious horseflies; they are only in season for two weeks and this happens to be the time).

If you can’t beat ’em, celebrate ’em
Midge Hunt – ha ha

Fortunately, the thing I most wanted to see on the island is indoors: Kinloch Castle. This red sandstone pile was the playground of George Bullough, who built it as a hunting lodge at the turn of the 20th century.

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Unfortunately, we managed to time our one-night visit so that we just missed the only tour of the day. But once again a hospitable island resident came to our aid. When I told Gavin, our host at the hostel attached to the castle, that I was really bummed not to be able to get inside the castle, he offered to take us around on a private tour.

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Gav in the ballroom. He was a social studies teacher before he moved to Rum to be a full-time crofter.

You have to be a bit of a kook to construct a castle on a remote island. George was only 21 when he inherited the island of Rum from his father James, who had made his fortune in the textile business; sometimes goofy ideas sound good when you are 21. But he had the cash to make it happen, and George and his buddies had fun here for many seasons, shooting deer and racing their cars around the island’s three roads (George employed a team of men whose job it was to keep the roads raked for racing).

George had a wife, a society beauty named Monique Lily de la Pasture. Lady Monica was something of a character as well.

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Drinking tea on the lion skin in the living room. The lion skin is still there.

Gav told us that Lady Monica had a conservatory full of exotic plants and live hummingbirds. Unfortunately the heating system broke down one cold weekend and all the birds died. Her husband had them stuffed for her.

IMG_0123George was rather fond of stuffed animals.

IMG_0107The house is full of interesting artifacts. The eagle statue in the photo above was a gift from the emperor of Japan (George used to like to sail his huge yacht to exotic places).

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Rum has a population of 20, give or take a few. Check out the Isle of Rum News to see what it’s like to live in such a tiny community   It actually sounds like fun, so long as you got along with your neighbors.  We met one young woman who said she signed on to work there for 6 months but she’s still there, two years after her stint was up.

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Trotternish

Posted on 25 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

Inspired by our adventure yesterday (and undeterred by bad steps), we set out again today to explore Skye on foot. Today’s objective was Trotternish, the large peninsula at the north of the island.

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We hiked all day. We got a little bit lost, only this time we did not have to be rescued by capable Scottish people. Yay for us!

We earned our tea and cakes today.
Yum.

 

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No bad steps

Posted on 24 Jul 2013 by lornaofarabia

We are now on the Isle of Skye, aka “the misty isle.”

Today we drove in our rental car along a series of nerve-racking single-track roads to the village of Elgol.  Our plan was to go on a hike described in my Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands.  The idea is you take a small boat to the isolated Loch Coruisk, then hike along the coast back to Elgol.

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There is one catch to this, which the guidebook refers to and the boat operators post signs warning you about, complete with drawings and photos.  That is the Bad Step, a little bit of the trail that requires the hiker to edge along a section of rock 30 feet above the sea. Hah hah, we laughed. What ninnies these tourists are. We are the adventure travelers. No biggie.

We took the boat past seal- and bird-inhabited rocks to the place where you can walk to Lake Coruisk.

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We explored the lake shore and had a little picnic.

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Then we set out on the trail to Elgol.

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We negotiated the “tricky river crossing” mentioned in the Rough Guide, easy-peasy.

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As we went on, the trail got a little vague, and there were some sections that involved four-legged scrambling.  Still all do-able.  Until… the Bad Step.

Kosta went first. The step is out around a slight promontory in the rock, so we couldn’t actually see him from where we were. But we could hear the rising panic in his voice as he got partway around the narrow bit. There were a couple of tense moments when we wondered which of us was best qualified to attempt a rescue operation.

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Just before the bad step

Together we three decided this was not really something we wanted to do. Kosta edged his way back and we headed back the way we’d come.

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Of course, by now we had missed the boat back to Elgol (the boat full of all the cautious, smart people who know better than to go anywhere with the word Bad in it).

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We waited a while, and another boat came. It was too full to take us back but the captain said he’d ask his brother, who was bringing a boat full of French high school soccer players out for short look at the lake.

Once again, the hapless foreigners are saved by nice Scottish people. Really, this place is the best.

We rewarded ourselves with a delicious dinner of squat lobsters and tayberry cranachan.

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Then followed the cows home, slowly, along the single-track road.

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